Lauren Groff

“Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.”

“Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says.”

“Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?”

“Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions--how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.”

“It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.”

“In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.”